I worked at a casino for a while. It was by measure fascinating, taxing and ultimately dispiriting.

Once, one of my colleagues congratulated me saying, “we wondered how you’d fit in without any gaming background but you’ve settled in nicely”. Well yes, I’d been in casinos, visited Las Vegas and had read up, I even knew a few croupiers so had a pretty sound grasp of just how casinos functioned. I didn’t however feel the same awareness coming in the other direction but that’s another story.

Obviously some casino chicanery is well established; no clocks or windows alongside air-conditioning manipulation, heady noise, lights and booze, all spread across a dizzying layout, but I became particularly intrigued by the casino carpet.

It was horrible.

And everywhere.

Now this casino looked pretty nice and a king’s ransom had been spent on it but this carpet was frightful. Bizarrely it even ended up in the live music space even though I fought tooth and nail for it not to be. I did notice recently that it had been pulled up from in there and replaced with a more realistic (and much better looking) wooden floor. No one likes dancing on carpet. “It is better to learn late than never.” said Publilius Syrus.

The design is hard to describe but thinking back it had a series of rings and lines in purple, burgundy and yellow on a muddy brown base and resembled a tacky version of the timelord script from new Doctor Who. Actually that’s way too flattering a comparison.

So I looked into the background and history of casino carpets a little further.

Beyond their stain-disguising properties the studies I found seemed to argue that they were purposefully vulgar so as to mesmerize punters, appearing welcoming and pleasing to the eye. But that couldn’t be right, this thing I’d been walking on was ghastly.

Reading further, another theory proposed that having a carpet so cluttered and unpleasant made it harder to stare at, therefore encouraging casino customers to look up. The same applied to the ceiling so patrons have no option than to stare to the mid point, that being the tables and slots, and of course other people gambling. That made much more sense.

I went online a while ago and came across David G. Schwartz from the Gaming Studies Research Center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and author of a paper on casino carpet hermeneutics (that’s interpretation theory folks). David says, “Casino carpet is known an exercise in deliberate bad taste that somehow encourages people to gamble. In a strange way, though, it’s a sublime work of art, rivaling any expressionist canvas of the past century. Note the regal tones of Caesars Palace, the bountiful bouquet of Mandalay Place, the soft, almost abstract pointillism of Paris, all whispering, ‘Gamble, gamble’ just out of the range of consciousness as people walk to the nearest slot machine.”